Jeff Krasno
speaker
350 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jeff Krasno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And I look more or less the same as Jeff did yesterday. So there's a... Our sense of... identity is often anchored in this physical continuity of like, there's Jeff, there's a stable and reliable Jeff, you know? You know, any even brief excavation into human physiology reveals that that's like complete bollocks. You know, that is a complete and utter total delusion.
You know, we are nothing but change. We are seven octillion self-assembled atoms that were originally forged in the crucible of some supernova eight billion years ago. experiencing 37 billion billion, that's not a typo, chemical reactions per second. Per second. I am... I'm not even close to the same person right now than I was when I sat down and began this conversation.
And if you look kind of deeper into my organism, what you will find is 39 trillion prokaryotes, these little bacteria and archaea and fungi, these single-celled organisms. You know, they're on my skin, they're in my aura. Increasingly, we're finding them in every organ, but largely they're kind of partying down in the den of my colon. And these little bacteria, these gut bugs...
are regulate almost like every system in my body. And if you were to sum total of their DNA, it's like they have 150 times my DNA. And they're turning over like every four minutes to 24 hours. So I am in complete flux all of the time.
And sort of embracing this idea that I am process and not product was really empowering for me because if I am process, then my diabetes that I was diagnosed with five years ago was also just process. And so is every other disease. And that health really exists along this dynamic spectrum. And that we have a certain amount of jurisdiction or agency over our trajectory on that spectrum.
that we can, moment to moment, day by day, be moving towards wholeness, that's the process of healing, or moving towards disconnection and disease, it's the process of ailing. And I had agency. And so that sense of impermanence that was born out of my study of Buddhism, as applied to my physiology, was empowering and liberating.
I think the next sort of like part of the Rubik's Cube for me was also very much kind of within the Buddhist mindset. I mean, around... my body and my organism as being completely interconnected and interwoven with the environment. And you've probably come across this before, but the Buddha had this wonderful analogy through an image for the interconnected universe, and he called it Indra's net.
So he saw the universe as this endless cobweb They went on forever. And at every juncture of that cobweb was a crystalline diamond that reflected every other juncture. Sometimes it's a dewdrop, you know. And this is just a beautiful image for the nature of the universe. And it gave birth to this concept of dependent origination or in Sanskrit, I believe it's like pratitya sumat pada.
But that everything is reliant on everything else. And to be alive is actually to be alive. in relationship. That you cannot separate the function and behavior of an organism from the function and behavior of its environment. And again, this violates our sense of identity, because I won't put you, I won't say Andre feels this way, but I'll say I feel this way.
Most of the time, I feel like I'm this singular locus of consciousness, like crouching like a tiger somewhere behind here, somewhere in between my eyes, like separate from you, separate from the rest of humanity, separate from nature, often in competition with it, right? But again, any look remotely
excavation of human physiology completely dispels any notion of us being kind of these separate selves. I mean, you have plants in this room at the very, very most basic level. I'm in an interdependent relationship with these plants. They're creating oxygen. I do not create my own oxygen, sorry. I create their carbon dioxide. We're in this beautiful carbon cycle together.
But we see it everywhere as part of our daily experience. You have a very, very steep driveway. It is pretty steep. It is pretty steep, right? If I was going to walk up that driveway, I'd walk much slower as if I was walking on this sort of flat ground right here. I cannot separate my function from the function of the environment.
My walking is completely dependent on the topography of your particular driveway in this case. But, you know, and these are very anodyne sort of proteic examples, but once you start to think about like our relationship with the air and environmental toxins, or our food and our food system, or our loneliness and our separation from each other,
and you realize that you are completely interdependent with the world, then the light goes off. Where it's like, if your environment is shaping your experience of reality, then you need to adopt the behaviors and shape the environment that fosters health and well-being.
Yeah, no mud, no lotus, right? But I think this is the interesting thing. It's a very astute question. Because what are you trying, what's the goal, right? What is well-being and human efflorescence, really? And what I began to put my thumb on is that every healthy system clusters towards the middle. Every imprimatur of health.
well-being is an ability for an organism or a system to find balance or the middle. So again, this is very Buddhist in some ways, like the philosophy of Buddhism is Madhyamaka, the middle way. Now, initially, that was sort of like a middle way between asceticism and hedonism, but really was the avoidance of extremes. Now, if you look at economics, for example, I'll get back to your question.
I'm headed there slowly. But what is the healthiest economic system? It's one with a thriving middle class. It looks like a bell curve where the distribution of wealth is somewhere in the middle, right? What is the healthiest... ecological system. So one with lots of biodiversity, with a balance of different species, right?
And they just fight amongst themselves and nature selects for the best of them and they just kind of just continue to proliferate and grow and improve. What is the best, healthiest political system? One where there's a middle, right, where you can find common ground and cooperation. Not much to be found at this very moment, right?
So, again, you look at what is the unhealthiest system, one with very polarized extremes. You know, what's the healthiest system? One with strong middle. Like you look at your meditation practice. What is the focus of psychological health? The ability to center yourself, to always move yourself back to the middle, to this kind of unstable place in the middle. But if you look at human physiology...
The middle is called homeostasis. So the body is riddled with mechanisms that engineer for the middle, for the Goldilocks zone. If you look at like temperature regulation in the body, it's like you get really, really, really cold. What do you do? You start to shiver, right? And your body thermoregulates and you move yourself back into that little warm porridge of 98.6.
Showing 241–260 of 350 · page 13 of 18
← Previous
Next →